Search This Blog

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Bardo Pond: On The Ellipse

Six tracks? Even though the largest clocks in
at 12:56, and the smallest is nearly seven minutes in length, that still brings
us down to under an hour, and I still say, for a band like Bardo Pond, that's no
good. We need at least twenty minutes to get on that boat, twenty more to pump
our stomachs and be done with the seasickness, and then, just as you are
finally ready to go with the flow... the journey's over. Psychobummer.

On the other hand, On The Ellipse may be just the kind of Bardo Pond album that we wouldn't want to go on forever, because
this is where the band undergoes a shift of attitude. Suddenly, the psychedelic
netherworld tones down its usual primordial soup bubbling, and out comes... soul. Or some psychedelic netherworld
equivalent of soul, at least — the whole album is permeated with wailing,
moaning, groaning, sighing, and grumbling: this is definitely one unhappy soul
out there, cloaking the lava surface of the planet in universal sorrow.

ʽJDʼ opens the proceedings with an almost
minute-long flat wave of high-pitched feedback — just enough time to clear a
couple square miles around from all living souls — before adding a morose
acoustic rhythm and Isobel's never-changing ghost vocals. The formula itself remains
fairly standard, right down to the gradual intensification of the sea of electric
noise, but the way they use this «clean feedback» on the track is new to Bardo
Pond's manner of thinking, and may produce a serious depressive-demolishing
effect on the brain if allowed to go on for all of its seven minutes.

From there, the dirgey atmosphere only keeps
deepening: ʽEvery Manʼ could almost just as well be recorded by the likes of
the atmospheric doom metal band Agalloch, with its interchange of melancholic
acoustics and minimalistic heavy riffage (plus a safety pillow of floating
flutes), and ʽDom's Lamentʼ is built upon just one sad skeletal flute / guitar
mantra that nevertheless has enough depth to somehow warrant seven minutes of
repetition.

Of the remaining three tracks, ʽWalking Cloudsʼ
is the only one to completely side away from heaviness and just work on the
strength of multiple echoey acoustic and vocal overdubs — and yet, somehow, the
whole thing never feels as «heavy», in the technical sense, as Amanita or any other classic BP album.
It has a different kind of heaviness — a heavy darkness. Bardo Pond were never
a particularly «fun» band, but it wasn't until Dilate's ʽTwo Planesʼ that they started experimenting with textures
that would be targeted at the listener's emotional rather than physio­logical nerve
centers, and apparently, they found the idea quite promising.

So here we are — a whole record of typical BP-style
lethargic languidness, but this time dedica­ted to the ruins of their imaginary
world, after a good old bombardment has wiped out most of the organic and
inorganic activity. ʽNight Of Frogsʼ indeed (and the track opens with an
appropriate­ly croaky wah-wah explosion). Is it a good thing? I am not sure —
almost every track does have at least one interesting and resonant idea, but
the construction mechanics, by now, is so utterly predictable (start out quiet,
build up sea of noise, cool it down before the end) that I feel confused — if
they are trying to pick at my soul now, why do it the same way they were
picking away at my cerebral cortex before? Yes, overall, On The Ellipse has its moments, but I dare say that Bardo Pond were
better when they were hot, and here,
they are not just simply cold, they are in­tentionally locking themselves up in
a freezer — and for what it's worth, Isobel Sollenberger is a respectable lady,
but she ain't no Nico.